I recently inherited an old iMac G5 at work and it has helped broaden my perspective on Macs. Here are some random observations:

This is an August 2004, 17″ model. The body is largely plastic (white plastic at that!). It doesn’t have an integrated iSight web-cam. Still I was pleased to see a matte screen. The machine has 3 USB and 2 FireWire ports (same as current iMac models).

The machine was running Mac OS 10.3.9 (Panther) which was my biggest pain point. The OS itself was quite usable but practically every new Mac product doesn’t support Panther. I knew I had to move to Tiger or Leopard.

Ultimately, I did a clean install of Leopard. The OS is reasonably snappy (and boots-up fast too) for a machine that is 4 years old and boasts of just 1.2 GB memory. I wasn’t allowed to boot from an external bootable USB hard-disk, so I installed the OS off the DVD. (Holding down the Alt/Option key after boot-up sound only showed DVD as an option). While I’ve rued the big file sizes of Universal Binaries as an intel Mac user, I’ve now developed great appreciation for Apple having kept things this way. I could reuse my already downloaded applications without having to download a special PowerPC version.

The keyboard felt very clunky and was a pain to type on! It does have two USB ports on it to which you can hook-up the mouse. I am replacing it with the new aluminum keyboard tomorrow.

I am no fan of the Mighty Mouse, but the mouse that came with the iMac G5 makes the Mighty Mouse look good! I sorely miss the presence of a scroll wheel/scroll ‘ball’.

Virtualization is virtually ruled out. Parallels, VirtualBox and VMWare are intel/x86 only. Connectix used to have a PowerPC virtualization product, but after Microsoft acquired them it seems to have vanished after a few years of being on life support.

The iPhone SDK is again intel only. Thankfully, the dev tools (XCode 3 et. al.) still install – even if you have downloaded the iPhone SDK package.

It’ll be interesting to see how much success I have installing open source packages via MacPorts. I need to install mod_perl and an assortment of CPAN modules – the ones that come with Mac OS 10.5 don’t cut it for me.